My Own Homebrew Rules

[Captain Hobokus]

Now if I can only find the sheet of paper I had...

After a few minutes of searching through Boot Hill role-playing notes (beats me why it was there...) I found folder with my handwritten notes I started before I bought my lovely laptop. Essentially my two uncles and I played Space Crusade a few years back and decided upon these rules in the middle of gameplay. We were playing through the apparently "hard" campaign in the white dwarf (which I found years back one day and remembered about it a few days before). We used ad-hoc rules for the terminators and also found it wasn't that "hard", it might have been my novice level of Alien play; I'd always play Blood Angels normally, but one player had termies and the other had power armor and still they were quite successful.
Anyway, we decided to throw together a few house rules I'm going to share with you all. There is a possibility that there's someone else who has done one or more of these, but its totally up to you which one you use.

Chaos Commander
We eventually thought it unfair that the chaos commander "had" to use a heavy bolter, so we decided that the chaos commander would enter with a particular piece of commander gear just like the Imperial Dogs would. The choice must be verbally made as the commander blip is revealed, but the alien player can take a moment to choose which weapon to use. Don't bother exchanging the weapon, but write down WHAT you choose. Even though we never changed his LP amount, it still could get confusing as to what he might have.

Heavy Weapons Chaos Marine
In much the same way as the chaos commander, the heavy weapons marine can choose what weapon he enters the game with, but with a few exceptions. One; he cannot pick suer-heavy weapons (as at the time I did not have the rules), and two; he cannot pick homebrew weapons (as I haven't playtested or have the rules yet). An addition as well should be that he cannot pick Eldar heavy weapons - he is a former Imperial soldier and would have access to those weapons only (which makes the super-heavy and homebrew exceptions questionable but hey, we made it up on the spot). The weapon choice must be made verbally as the blip is revealed and the alien player can have a moment to choose which weapon.

There are no points changes to either blip, but if the alien player "forgets" to announce which weapon the model has, they revert back to their "default" weaponry. By using this rule makes the chaos space marines actually feel like the alien player's commander squad is in the hulk. I just had an idea that perhaps the alien player could use one of Mezillious' "Rise of Chaos" squads as his own in the same way as a regular marine player...hmmmm...
Well, that's two long posts in one day! Better stop posting like this...

[MortiS-the-Lost]

Cool, my group do a similar thing where we have several different models for the Chaos Commander and Heavy Weapon Marine and pick randomly when their Blips come up - it's little tweaks like this that can add depth to the basic gameplay without it all becoming too complicated